Saturday, 22 September 2012

It's over. Here I am at the beach saying goodbye to the ocean and the summer before returning to my villa in Oretania. It's quite sad, except, of course, that as a ghost, I know I will be able to return next summer, since hardly anything ever happens to us and drives us off track. It is rather like being a retiree. Another advantage of being a ghost is that I can listen to the songs the sirens sing without turning into fertilizer for plants. Yes, those plump little birdlike creatures in the image below are the sirens. You can't hear them, but they are singing goodbye to me with all their heart, and I will tell you their story before I return home.

Now some say the sirens are two and others say they are five, but I am a personal friend of eight. And that's what I told the illustrator when I described the sirens to her so she could draw them. Eight, and something like the Ronettes, I said.

I bet you thought a siren looked like a mermaid, with long wet hair and the shimmering tail of a fish. Well, no. Not exactly. The sirens were originally friends and companions of the maiden Persephone. They tried to help her mother, Demeter, the goddess of agriculture, find her when she was kidnapped by Hades, the god of the underworld. So they could participate more effectively in the search for Persephone, Demeter changed them into birds.

Somehow, they ended up living in an island called Anthemusa. It had flowery meadows, but was surrounded by rocks and cliffs. The sirens were wonderful singers, and they had the gift of knowing all about the past and the future. They were, however, pretty dangerous, because they were so fascinating that once people started listening to them, they wanted to go on listening forever. Perhaps that is why they moved to the island, so as not to cause as much trouble as they might if they moved about freely.

Most of their victims were sailors who happened to sail by Antemusa. When these men heard them sing, they would leap off their ships and try desperately to swim to shore and reach the sirens. Many drowned and others were smashed against the rocks. Those that made it alive to the island would just sit there doing nothing but listen to the sirens until they died of starvation. This was all a bit revolting, because it seems their bodies remained where they had fallen, turning into fertilizer for the flowery meadows.

I alone can boast of having lived after listening to the songs of the sirens. I had the men in my crew stopper their ears with wax when we sailed by Anthemusa. And I had myself bound to the mast of my ship so I could not leap from it into the ocean. I almost went mad pleading to be released so I could chase after the sirens, but my men rowed past the sirens' territory and I lived to tell the tale.